PREreview of School Librarians’ AI Literacy, Readiness and Professional Engagement with AI Technologies: An International Survey

The preprint has some interesting results on an underexplored topic that is relevant to librarianship. These results can be of interest to a wide audience of practitioners and scholars. Overall, the paper is well-written, and the results are clearly described; however, it could be strengthened with a few changes.

Major issues

• At the end of the discussion section, the authors suggest adopting the AI leadership framework to train school librarians in AI so they can eventually lead AI governance and ethical initiatives. This suggestion is interesting. However, it is important to mention in the paper that one of the preprint authors developed this framework. It would also be beneficial to contextualize this framework with references to similar work conducted by other researchers.

• The last paragraph of the conclusion mentions that “the findings reveal both notable progress and persistent disparities in AI readiness across regions and institutional contexts”. However, the results presented in the paper do not support this conclusion. Table 2 shows that region and school type do not have a statistically significant effect on AI literacy levels. Furthermore, regions such as South America and Africa are underrepresented among the respondents of the survey, so a more inclusive sample would be needed to support this assertion. Instead, I suggest highlighting that education was the only variable that had a significant effect in AI literacy levels.

Minor issues

• In the literature review section, the sentence that begins with “As of August 2024“ is hard to read. Removing the text in brackets or moving it to the end of the sentence might help with the readability.

• Also in the literature review, it would be beneficial to move the third paragraph up to discuss national AI policies first before moving on to recent studies on AI use in education.

• In the Participants & Data Collection section, was the survey only available in English? If so, I recommend mentioning this, it could help explain why most of the responses were from North America and Europe. 

• In the discussion section, it would be interesting to discuss why demographic variables other than education (such as country or years of experience) did not significantly influence AI literacy.

• In the last two paragraphs of the discussion section, the “Figure 3” and “Table 7” texts should be integrated into the body of the paragraphs. 

Competing interests

The author declares that they have no competing interests.